Musings on science, the Bible, and fantastic literature (and sometimes basketball and other stuff).
God speaks to us through the Bible and the findings of science, and we should listen to both types of revelation.
The title is from Psalm 84:11.
The Wikipedia is usually a pretty good reference. I mostly use the World English Bible (WEB), because is public domain. I am grateful.

Thursday, February 11, 2016

Ken Ham's view of the origin of species is impossible

A little over two years ago, Bill Nye and Ken Ham had a debate on their views of origins, with Ham arguing that the earth is but a few thousand years old, and Nye that it is much older than that.

In a recent post, Natural Historian, (Joel Duff) takes a close look at Ham's views, and finds that they are not compatible with the Bible, or with the way things are now.

Natural Historian uses a slide from the debate, which slide shows Ham's view on the origin of the species of animals now living on earth. That view is that there were a few kinds of animals (dog-like, cat-like, etc.) on the ark, in pairs, but that since the Flood, about 4500 years ago, these kinds gave rise to all the dog-like and cat-like species we have today, plus any that are now extinct, but known from their fossils. See here for a discussion of this, from a young-earth creationist viewpoint.

Natural Historian says that this is impossible, because there are so many species of animals today, that, if they all arose from a much smaller number of ancestral types, the new species would have had to evolve at a very rapid rate, so rapid that we would find it easy to observe new species arising during recent time. We haven't seen any such thing. Also, Natural Historian says that there is no indication, in the Bible, but that dogs were dogs, camels were camels, etc., way back in Biblical times, even in Job, which was supposedly written soon after the Flood. The Bible, says Natural Historian, describes about 100 species of animals, with no indication that any of them were different, in Bible times, from those in existence today. Illustrations of animals, by ancient peoples, show no differences between those animals and those now alive.